My #1 requirement for starting an enterprise community (whether that is using a discussion board, blog, wiki, social network or other tool) is: Constituents Who Care
If you are thinking about using social media tools it is essential that you start with a set of people who care about the topic at hand. Realistically you also need not only a wide range of people that care but a handful that care deeply. It's the only way to get activity. Without activity none of the other requirements, benefits, or risks matter.
Now there is one major caveat. The constituents - whether they be customers, partners, employees, or the general public - can be passionate in their dislike as well as passionate in their likes. If you are thinking "well, we are pretty average" this is not good enough. Online, a vocal minority sometimes can become the majority voice making average a risky position from which to start a community.
The problem: your customer/employee satisfaction scores are average. How do you determine whether every constituent is only sort of happy, whether you have a bi-modal distribution of very passionate responses, or whether responses are all over the place and only moderately felt. It's pretty hard to tell from the typical customer satisfaction score how big and passionate your 'dissatisfied' constituents are. Layer on that the human impulse to want to please and you confuse matters even more.
Which brings me to dissatisfaction. What if we forgot about satisfaction - it's really just a feel good measurement for ourselves anyway - and measure customer/employee dissatisfaction. Maybe it would go something like this:
- How unhappy are you about x?
- How frustrated are you with: the product/service/content/company?
- Given the expectations you had, how disappointed were you with the product/job/service?
- What are your top 5 complaints/frustrations/disappointments?
- Is there anything that confuses you?
I don't necessarily recommend sending out that set of questions in a complete vacuum with no explanation but I do think it might actually be more instructive than asking "How satisfied are you?" Asking this question would also allow you to effectively gauge your audience and what kind of issues might emerge in a community and the percentage of constituents who are dissatisfied. If you have high dissatisfaction scores for more than 15-20% of your constituents I would recommend holding off on launching a community - there are bigger issues to deal with.
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